Theater: Desperate Writers at the Edgemar Theater Center.

It's not just the writers who appear desperate in this clubfooted comedy by Joshua Grenrock and Catherine Schreiber, it's the actors, too. And, after about twenty minutes of being trapped in the world of this unpleasant, pseudo-glib, and wearisome Hollywood farce, the audience quickly becomes desperate, as well. This is one of those comedies which appears written by Hollywood fringe insiders, who are indeed desperate – desperate to work off the hostility and envy of a Tinseltown that has never given them the cash, power, and glittering prizes that are their supposed just deserts. Folks like this inevitably write Hollywood "comedies" that "trenchantly skewer" the excesses and shallowness of Tinseltown – excesses and shallownesses which they'd be only too happy to engage in given half the chance. David (Brian Krause) and Ashley (Kate Hollinshead) are lovers and co-writers, toiling on their script in the hopes of making a sale that will allow them to get married and live the life they've wanted – no, that they deserve (they think). Shame on those evil movie executives for not bowing to the inevitable and snapping up their opuses! When David and Ashley can't get a meeting to save their life, they do the most logical thing they can think of: They kidnap three sleazy movie moguls (Grenrock, Schreiber, and Andrew Ross Wynn), and imprison them in a cage, until the execs agree to read David's script. Although one exec has a heart attack, the others are soon engaged in a bidding war for David's work, thus proving that crime pays many dividends. Admittedly, Schreiber and Grenrock aren't aiming any higher than Generic Sit Com, but even by those standards the writing is surface glib, with little content or psychological believability. The characters, intended as being charming, are flat out repulsive, with Krause and Hollinshead's self-justifying, creepy writer couple being particularly offputting. The stock stereotype trio of moguls are little more than standard issue movie biz scuzzbuckets: We sense that the writers could have used the premise to actually spoof specific Hollywood types and characters, but there's the ultimate sense that, well, the authors don't actually seem to know much about what they're writing about – with the result that the piece descends into clumsy gags, chaotic shtick, and a feelgood finale that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, all things considered. Maybe it might be time for a moratorium on the sort of drama in which a character kidnaps another character and gets rewarded for it.